Voorn says: “The biggest changes have been around centralisation, and a growing awareness of the importance and value of data, and the need to structure and standardise that data in order to extract value from it. With the rise of digital systems in business, and their inevitable impact on global procurement processes, the effects are considerable. We also have Salesforce to complement this process, and a few other systems which together operate to manage the entire end-to-end (E2E) process.”

We have our Category Management and Contracting Process framework, which lays out the requirements that everybody needs to meet, which we incorporated into the system, SAP Ariba, which has embedded DocuSign. We have a few key tools to carry out this function. Now at Shell, and describing the interplay of procurement structures and systems that brought this transformation about, Voorn says: “Each business has a procurement function, but they fall under one Executive Vice President, and my organisation supports all of these different businesses centrally. How digital tools fuel Shell’s procurement process From there, he was integral in centralising their procurement activities, moving into a role to digitalise their contingent workforce spend and activities. Voorn has been in procurement for the last 20 years, starting in an internal supply chain management consulting practice and within that role, helping to manage one of the company’s strategic supplier relationships ‒ their technology partner for telecoms. “My current role is really focused on looking at how we can digitalise,” he says, “and with that, largely automate these processes.” Leading a transformation to digitise and automate Shell’s S2C (Source-to-Contract) and E2E (End-to-End) processes, Sander Voorn, the S2C Digital and Process Transformation Design Manager at Shell, discusses how the use of certain digital systems and tools have had a huge and measurable impact on their output.

Ariba s2c